| Ibanez's Explora Resorts |
|
|
|
Page 1 of 3
A Place in the Hills 
Pedro Ibáñez - Photo by Virginia Del Giudice
As a university student, Ibáñez began to explore his country solo. “I was almost the only one out there,” he remembers. “Chile was very much unknown at the time—even to Chileans.” On his first trip to the Atacama Desert—the world’s driest, where a typical rainy season lasts a week and brings a deluge of five millimeters—the roads were so deteriorated that it took more than two days to get there from his home in Santiago, about 600 miles away. When he finally arrived, he says, “It was a magnet. I knew I’d be going back all my life.” An inch or two over six feet, Ibáñez, 68, has a graceful bearing and thick gray hair that lend him extra height. He exercises nearly every day, and has the craggy, windburned poise of a man as comfortable on horseback as behind an executive’s desk. Principally a food tycoon, Ibáñez also became a travel entrepreneur in 1993, when he launched Explora, a collection of properties throughout Chile, including lodges in Patagonia’s Torres del Paine National Park and in San Pedro de Atacama, a green oasis in the desert. The company has plans for a third lodge, to open late this year on Easter Island, and a fourth, in Argentina. Recently, Explora also began offering Travesías—journeys through multiple destinations lasting five to 11 days. All the Explora trips are united by Ibáñez’s fresh, even quietly revolutionary, approach to tourism—“a philosophy of travel,” as the company’s Web site puts it, “born out of the desire to explore.” The Explora resorts are contradictory: aesthetically spare but luxurious in their essence, lodges where the raison d’être is to send people out on adrenaline-inducing adventures rather than keeping them on the property to labor at their suntans. At each destination, half- or full-day excursions—on foot, horseback, or bicycle—are led by guides well versed in the region’s flora, fauna, and geology. As they escort the guests, they focus on what they see along the path—400-year-old cactuses in the middle of the desert, say, or the significance of a certain mountain to the indigenous Chileans. The ultimate destination is almost an afterthought. “Modern tourism takes you from one point to another the fastest and cheapest way possible, avoiding whatever delay or surprise that might occur along the road,” Ibáñez says. In contrast, Explora focuses on moving “with one’s five senses wide open to perceive reality. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|